The House of a Hundred Whispers Page 8

  Katharine said nothing to that, but went on brushing her hair, although harder this time, as if it had done something to annoy her. John went around the bedroom, knocking at the dado panels. The tester bed was still unmade, so he lifted the pillows away and took a close look at the carved wooden bedhead, which was elaborately decorated with fruit and flowers. He tried sliding it from side to side, and then tugging at it, to see if he could dislodge it. If it could be removed, it would certainly have opened up a wide enough space for a priest to squeeze himself through.

  He tugged at it again and again, but eventually he put back the pillows and shook his head. ‘Solid elm. Only a bedhead. Pity. Would have been quite ingenious, wouldn’t it?’

  He paced the length of the bedroom to measure it. ‘Thirteen feet, the same as the room next door. There’s no priest hole in here, either.’ Turning to Katharine, he said, ‘Thank you… sorry if we disturbed you.’

  Katharine shrugged. ‘Personally, I think you’re wasting your time searching the house. Timmy’s probably miles away by now.’

  ‘Oh, we’re still combing the moors. And if we haven’t found him by lunchtime we’ll have at least two dozen more volunteers out this afternoon, before it starts getting dimpsey.’

  Katharine said nothing, but put down her hairbrush and leaned forward to stare at her reflection in close-up.

  When John had finished checking all the bedrooms, he took a look in the bathroom. When Allhallows Hall was built, long before hot running water and flushing toilets, this would have simply been another bedroom, so it was possible that there might have been a priest hole built into one of the walls. But after tapping and measuring yet again – even climbing into the bath so he could knock on the wall behind it – he had to admit that he was unable to find one.

  ‘Perhaps the priest that was caught here had simply been hiding in a wardrobe or under one of the beds,’ Rob suggested. ‘I used to have nightmares about somebody hiding under my bed… maybe that was why.’

  As they made their way back towards the landing, John looked up at the trapdoor in the ceiling.

  ‘Is it easy to get up into the attic?’

  ‘Reasonably,’ said Rob, opening the nearest bedroom door and showing him the old wooden stepladder that was leaning against the wall. ‘But Martin and I went up there yesterday and we couldn’t see anywhere that Timmy could have hidden. There’s nothing but the water tank and a whole pile of old suitcases.’

  ‘All the same,’ John told him. ‘And I’ll want to search that bedroom, too.’

  Rob dragged the stepladder out into the corridor and opened it up. ‘Just be careful… I’ll hold on to it because the cord’s broken and we don’t want it doing the splits when you get to the top.’

  John warily mounted the stepladder, which creaked ominously with every step that he took. He lifted the trapdoor, reached around and switched on the lights. Then he heaved himself right up into the attic, and disappeared.

  Rob and Vicky waited in the corridor as they heard him walking from one side of the attic to the other.

  ‘Anything?’ called Rob, after a while.

  ‘No… nowhere to hide a priest. And no sign of your little lad… not unless he’s hiding under all these clothes.’

  ‘What clothes?’

  ‘All these clothes that are strewn all over the place. You said there were suitcases up here, didn’t you? They’re wide open, all of them. The whole attic looks like an H-bomb’s been dropped on a charity shop.’

  ‘You’re joking,’ said Rob. He beckoned to Vicky and said, ‘Can you hold the stepladder steady for me? I have to see this.’

  He climbed up until he was high enough to see inside the attic. Carefully turning around, he saw John standing beside a knee-deep heap of sweaters, jackets, shirts, trousers and underwear, as well as washbags and books and several pairs of men’s brogues. All of the suitcases he had seen when he had climbed up here with Martin were lying around, and as John had said, all of them were gaping wide open. Somehow, somebody had managed to gain access to the attic without being seen or heard by any one of them, open up all the suitcases and tip out their contents onto the boarded floor.

  ‘I’m stunned,’ said Rob. ‘I’m totally baffled. I mean, this is seriously creepy. None of these cases was open when we saw them yesterday. I can’t understand how anybody could possibly have got up here to do this. Or why.’

  ‘Whoever it was, it could be that they were looking for something.’

  ‘That’s more than likely, although I still can’t work out how they got up here without us being aware of it. But we’ll never know what it was they were looking for, will we? If they found it they’ll have taken it away, and even if they couldn’t find it, because it wasn’t here, we still shan’t know what it was.’

  John bent down and lifted up the label that was tied to one of the suitcase handles.

  ‘A. Mallett. HMP Dartmoor.’

  ‘Yes… they’re all prisoners’ suitcases, although I have no idea why my dad had them all stored up here in his attic.’

  ‘Now that somebody’s been rifling through them, I think we need to tell Sergeant Billings. Just like you say, we can’t guess what they were looking for and whether they found it or not. Could have been anything, couldn’t it? A gun? Drugs? Uncut diamonds? Some incriminating piece of evidence?’

  He stood up straight again, taking a last look around the attic. ‘Whoever it was, they weren’t hiding in a priest hole up here, because there isn’t one.’

  *

  They climbed back down the stepladder.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Vicky. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘I think I’d feel better if I had seen a ghost,’ said Rob. ‘At least that would have been some explanation.’

  He told her about the open suitcases, and how their contents had been scattered around the attic floor.

  ‘John thinks we ought to tell the police about it, and of course I will. I still can’t understand what all those prisoners’ belongings were doing up in the attic anyway.’

  ‘You don’t think your father could have—?’

  ‘Stolen them? No. Why would he? It’s not as though there’s anything valuable in them – not as far as we know, anyway. Only clothes and toiletries and shoes – the sort of things you pack when you’re going away for a holiday or a business trip.’

  They walked back to the landing.

  ‘I’m going to call Sergeant Billings now,’ said Rob, but before he could start back downstairs, John caught hold of his sleeve and said, ‘Wait a moment, Mr Russell.’

  ‘What is it?’

  John pointed to the small latticed window on the left side of the landing.

  ‘Look how far away that window is, compared to the stained-glass windows in the first two bedrooms. Hold on, let me measure it.’

  He walked heel-to-toe towards the window and then turned around. ‘Twenty feet. More than seven feet longer than the distance from the doors to the windows in the bedrooms.’

  ‘I never noticed that before. But it doesn’t make any sense, does it? Those two bedrooms both have windows that look out over the garden. If you go down to the garden you can look up and you can see them. Both stained glass.’

  ‘Can you open them?’

  ‘No, but they both let daylight in.’

  John knocked on the wall. He pressed his ear to the plaster and knocked again, harder this time.

  ‘I’m not sure, but I think there could be a cavity behind here.’

  ‘Okay… but how would anybody manage to hide themselves in it? There’s no door.’

  ‘Let’s check the bedrooms again. I was only tapping at the dado last time, to see if it sounded hollow, which it didn’t. But maybe the panelling can be opened up somehow. If there’s a cavity there, there must be some kind of access to it.’

  They went back to the first and second bedrooms. John switched on the bedside lamps, as well as taking out his own pocket flashlight. He inspected th
e dado panelling inch by inch, occasionally tugging at the beading in between the panels to see if it came loose, and trying to slide the dado rails right and left.

  ‘Nothing that I can see so far,’ he said, as they stepped back out into the corridor. ‘But I have the strongest feeling that there’s a recess behind there.’

  ‘I don’t see how there can be,’ said Rob. ‘Those are outside walls.’

  ‘But there’s a seven-foot discrepancy between the length of the landing and the length of all three bedrooms.’

  ‘It could be just an optical illusion. I mean, the whole house is wonky. They didn’t build them with plans in those days.’

  ‘A few inches out of line, yes, I can go along with that. But seven feet?’

  Rob could only shrug in resignation. He was at a loss to explain how the landing could be so much longer than the bedrooms beside it, but the bedrooms had windows in them, so there was no possibility that there was any kind of priest’s hole behind their end walls.

  John went back into the third bedroom. Again, he went all the way around the dado, tapping and tugging and sliding.

  ‘This is driving me insane,’ he said, when he had finished.

  Vicky had been looking around, too. She lifted the lid of the window seat, even though she knew that Rob and Martin had already looked inside. She leaned over and picked up some of the rolled-up bundles of legal documents. Underneath them she found a white pennant with a red cross on it, frail with age, like the pennant carried by Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God. When she lifted that up, she uncovered even more rolled-up documents, but she could also see something metallic glinting right at the bottom of the chest. She cleared aside more rolls of paper and saw that it was a mottled brass crucifix, a little less than a foot long, with an irritated-looking Jesus nailed onto it.

  ‘Anything interesting?’ asked Rob, peering over her shoulder.

  ‘No… just a lot of old deeds and wills by the look of it. And this.’

  She tried to pick up the crucifix, but the foot of the cross was hinged to the floor, and she could only swing it upright. It swung up quite easily, as if it had been oiled.

  ‘This is peculiar, Rob – look,’ said Vicky. She folded the crucifix back down flat, and then swung it up again so that he could see.

  ‘Wow. I wonder why on earth it’s stuck to the floor like that.’

  He was interrupted by a sharp scraping sound, followed by a series of plaintive creaks. He turned around to see that the three central panels of the dado at the end of the bedroom were slowly opening up, like the lower half of a stable door. Behind them was another room, dimly illuminated with reddish light.

  John had been texting on his phone, but he stopped, too, with his finger poised over the keys.

  ‘Well, bugger me,’ he said. ‘That Nicholas Owen. Even more cleverer than I thought he was.’

  He dropped his phone back into his pocket and went over to the window seat.

  ‘Do you know what? This crucifix isn’t a crucifix at all. It’s a handle. It’s probably attached to a lever, and when you lift it up, it must activate some arrangement of strings and pulleys and weights under the floorboards, and the dado opens up. There’s a similar set-up at one of the priest holes in Tavistock – a warming pan hanging on the kitchen wall. You tilt the warming-pan handle to one side and a door opens up in the brickwork beside it. It’s cunning, but not quite as cunning as this.’

  ‘You mean to say this crucifix has been lying here for four hundred years and nobody has found out what it’s for?’

  ‘The likelihood is that the Wilmingtons knew exactly what it was for. But Allhallows Hall was passed down from one generation of Wilmingtons to the next. Your father was the first to own it who wasn’t a Wilmington.’

  Vicky took hold of Rob’s hand and squeezed it tight. ‘Do you think there’s anybody in there? You don’t think that—’ She didn’t say, ‘Timmy’s in there, unconscious or dead?’

  ‘One way to find out,’ said John. He went to the end of the room and crouched down by the opening in the dado. ‘Anybody in there?’ he called out. Then, even louder, ‘Is there anybody in there because if there is you’d best be coming on out as quick as you like!’

  He waited, but there was no answer. He looked back at Rob and Vicky, and then, with his head down and his knees bent, he shuffled inside. When he stood up straight, they could see him only from the waist down.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Rob asked him.

  ‘Gobsmacking. That’s all I can say. You both need to come in here and see this. You won’t believe your eyes.’

  14

  Rob and Vicky crouched down to enter the room and then stood up. The room had roughly plastered walls and the floorboards were covered in coarse brown horsehair matting that felt as if it were two or three inches deep. The air was stale, but the faint hint of cinnamon and oranges was slightly more distinct, so that even Rob could smell it.

  At the far end of the room lay a heap of dirty wool blankets, as if several people had been sleeping there, but the room was empty. There was no sign of Timmy, and no sign of whoever or whatever might have pushed Vicky out of the bedroom. But it was the windows that caught their attention most of all. On the left-hand side of the room were the two stained-glass windows at the ends of the first and second bedrooms, with their multicoloured diamond patterns. On the right-hand side were two identical stained-glass windows, which must have been the ones that overlooked the garden. From the outside of the house, nobody would have realised that they weren’t the same windows.

  ‘So this is the priest’s hole that the Wilmingtons had built,’ said John. ‘It’s extraordinary those priest hunters never found it. I mean, they were pretty canny. Pursuivants they were called, and they were former spies and mercenaries. They could make themselves a fair amount of bounty if they caught a priest.’

  ‘We were certainly never aware that this room was here,’ said Rob. ‘I can’t believe the size of it.’

  ‘Yes – it’s much larger than most priest’s holes, but that’s the trick, in a way. All three bedrooms along this corridor are the same length. You can imagine the priest hunters rushing upstairs to see if they could catch a priest up here, and measuring the bedrooms. They obviously overlooked to compare the length of the bedrooms with the width of the landing.’

  ‘We only ever used the first two bedrooms for visitors, and the end bedroom we never used at all, except for storing stuff. I lifted up that window seat once but when I saw that it was stuffed full of old papers I didn’t bother to look any further.’

  ‘Your father must have bothered to look, some time after you left home. If not your father, somebody did. I wonder if he found this room but never told anybody about it.’

  ‘I don’t see why he wouldn’t. But then he was such a grumpy bastard. He wouldn’t tell you what day of the week it was if he could help it.’

  ‘Rob,’ Vicky chided him.

  ‘I know. I shouldn’t speak ill of him now he’s dead. I just hope they have spy cameras in hell so that he can hear what we’ve been saying about him.’

  John stamped two or three times on the floor. ‘Nicholas Owen would have laid down all this horsehair so that nobody downstairs could hear the priest walking about. And there’s an extra layer of plaster on the walls, by the look of it.

  He paused for a few moments, his eyes half-closed, as if he were listening. Then he said, ‘Do you feel something in here? There’s that cinnamony smell… but something more than that.’

  Vicky closed her eyes, too. After a while she said, ‘I’m not sure. Rob? Can you feel anything?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like… I don’t know. It’s almost as if there’s somebody else in here with us, but we can’t see them, and they’re holding their breath, too, so that we can’t hear them, either.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I feel,’ said John. He went over to the heap of blankets and lifted up two or three of them to look underneath, but there was nothing there. />
  Rob closed his eyes. He listened hard, but all he could hear was the faraway sound of a tractor puttering its way up the lane towards Wormold’s Farm.

  ‘No,’ he said, but as he opened his eyes he felt somebody brush against his left shoulder, only lightly, as if they were squeezing past him to get off a bus. He clapped his hand against his arm and turned around, but there was nobody there.

  ‘What?’ said Vicky.

  ‘I thought – I thought somebody touched me. That’s what it felt like, anyway.’

  ‘It might have been. It could have been. Somebody pushed me over, Rob, and I couldn’t see them, either.’

  John looked serious. ‘It’s not a joke, this. I think there’s something real queer about this room. I don’t believe in ghosts. Not the sort that go around in white sheets going “wooo!” Not that sort, anyway. But I do believe we all have spirits and who’s to say that those spirits don’t outlive us when we’re gone?’

  ‘You may be right and you may be wrong, but we’ve found the priest hole and Timmy’s not in it. So what are we going to do now?’

  ‘We’ll carry on searching over the moors, of course. And the cops’ll be doing everything they can… putting out appeals on the telly and the radio, asking people for dashcam footage, knocking on doors.’

  Vicky circled around the room, reaching out and gently touching the walls and the stained-glass windows as if she could pick up clues about Timmy’s whereabouts. Her eyes were filling up with tears again, and when she spoke her voice was tight with pain. ‘I don’t know, Rob. I know it’s not logical. But I have such a strong feeling that Timmy’s still here somewhere – here in the house.’

  ‘Vicks, darling, we’ve looked everywhere. He just isn’t.’

  ‘But I feel that he is! I don’t know why, but I do!’

  John glanced at Rob as if he were seeking his approval, and then he turned back to Vicky. ‘If you feel that, then I don’t think there’s any harm in my calling on Ada Grey.’

  ‘Who’s Ada Grey?’